“It’s because you two goddesses wouldn’t shut up!”
This was bad… I could only hope this didn’t mean the tables would turn and leave us in a tight spot…
“I will CHANGE into a demon from this world!”
The elder god’s body began to morph! It glowed, transforming from a slime into something tall…
…wobbly, and hard to describe. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
It had winglike appendages, but they were stuck into the ground, and there were a lot of…tails? Sprouting all over it…?
One might very charitably call it a chimera, since it was incorporating elements from a whole mess of creatures. That said, I got the feeling that would be an insult to chimerakind.
“Heh-heh, I’M a demon NOW!”
I was pretty sure no demon looked like that.
“Dekyari’tosde, you haven’t improved at all… You are terrible at this! You have no creativity!”
Now that Nintan mentioned it, the elder god’s pictures were all made up of random lines, too…
“I WILL fight with this body! I WILL send YOU away and I WILL live a free life on my OWN!”
Was this gross, ugly-looking thing going to attack us now?
“I don’t really want to fight you, but fine! Let’s go!”
……
…………
For some reason, Dekyari’tosde wasn’t moving.
“Hmm? Is it charging up an attack? That thing video-game bosses sometimes do?”
I steeled myself further. When it came to things like this, attacking first always led to being countered and beat to a pulp…
Come at me!
“I cannot MOVE!”
The elder god sounded pitiful.
Really? Was it telling the truth?
“I see. Your imaginative skills are so poor that you are unable to function as a creature. You are simply an object.”
Nintan strode over to the god. Then she used what looked like a bright, glowing rope to bind the monster.
“I am tied up AND cannot move!”
“You could never move. Now you cannot transform into something else and run away.”
We had successfully captured the elder god.
After confirming everything was safe, we called over Beelzebub, Pecora, Laika, Flatorte, Fatla, Miyu, and Smarsly. All of them believed the elder god to be a real monster and were shocked.
Its body was a mess.
“I feel like I’m going to have nightmares, Lady Azusa…,” said Laika. “It must truly be a malevolent god…”
“That’s understandable, since you’ve only seen it in this form.”
“It looks sticky.”
“I guess not even you want to spar with this, huh, Flatorte?”
We finally had time to talk, so the elder god told us all about its circumstances, and we, in turn, explained what we knew.
When the seal came undone and Dekyari’tosde emerged into the underground city of Yostos, it decided to play around a bit.
It didn’t seem to have any desire for revenge against the world or Nintan and the other gods, though we’d kind of assumed as much once we found out it was staying at a hotel.
“By the way, do you have any demon money? That hotel is rather expensive~”
Pecora’s question wasn’t that critical, but it was something I’d been wondering, too.
“I learned that all I HAD to do was make shiny things, so that’s WHAT I did!”
The ground at the elder god’s feet suddenly turned into a lump of gold.
“I turned EARTH into gold. When I brought one in, they let ME stay as long as I LIKED!”
Its very existence was alchemy…
We asked the elder god not to connect the world of creatures it had created with this one. That was our greatest point of concern.
It readily agreed to our request. The elder god had no intentions of deliberately destroying the world, so the conversation went pretty smoothly.
Smarsly hopped over its cloth keyboard, spelling out a question.
“It wants to know specifically what sort of people live in the underworld,” Miyu said, speaking on Smarsly’s behalf.
“It’s difficult to EXPLAIN. The underworld is full of COOL CREATURES I CREATED, enjoying life.”
Suddenly, I understood everything.
A bunch of creatures that could damage one’s mind simply by looking at them—they were all down there, deep inside the earth… They may bear us no ill will, but we must never seek them out.
I decided to never venture down below.
There were things in this world I had no business sticking my nose into.
“Now then, we need to decide how to deal with Dekyari’tosde, the elder god. What do you think, Nintan?” Godly Godness asked.
This was a divine matter, so it made sense that the gods would decide.
“Yes… The seal has been undone, so I think it would give Us more peace of mind if it was somewhere We could keep an eye on it…”
“Gosh, you can never just be honest with yourself, can you? Why don’t you just admit you want to welcome it as a fellow god of the modern world?”
“Silence. Become a frog.”
Whoops, Godly Godness was a frog again…
“Very well. Dekyari’tosde, you are coming with Us. Do you mind?”
“Not at ALL! I’m glad! There is so MUCH I want to learn about this place!”
I was worried for a second, but it looked like everything was going to be fine.
“Dekie, I’m glad things have worked out, ribbit.”
“What did you say, frog?” asked Nintan. “What is dekie?”
“Dekyari’tosde is such a mouthful, so I’m calling it Dekie, ribbit!”
“That’s not bad at ALL!”
With that, we decided to call the elder god Dekie. It felt a bit like calling a neighbor by a nickname. I wasn’t sure that was appropriate for a god, but since so few people even knew its name, it was probably fine.
There was still one problem, though.
Nintan was looking at the elder god with an odd expression.
“We loathe the thought of leaving this place with you in that state; please take on a normal form…”
She had a point. If the elder god were to appear in the human world looking like that, everyone would think a malicious god had escaped. It’d cause a full-blown panic.
Just then, an idea struck me.
“We have a lot of options, don’t we?”
About an hour later, Dekie picked out one of the pictures submitted to Yostos’s original character design contest.
This, of course, was one of the contests we had held to smoke Dekie out.
“This one gets the elder god prize!”
Dekie stared hard at the picture as its gross, eldritch body glowed and morphed. At last, a divine being emerged that looked exactly like the picture.
She wore a large hat and a white robe befitting a god. Her hair was light green.
“Good! You look more like a god now.”
“This body is much easier to move around in, YES!”
That new form looked like a lot of work, but I was glad she was happy with it.
“Omigosh, Dekie, I’m a sage, so like, I really want to know what it’s like in the underworld. There must be sooo many clay tablets we haven’t discovered yet!”
Oh, right, this was something Miyu was deeply interested in.
“OKAY, OKAY! In that case—mfgh!”
Nintan clapped her hand over Dekie’s mouth.
“We shall share with you a more palatable version at a later date. If she were to tell you herself, your mind would shatter.”
I bet the world was full of monsters that looked like Dekie’s previous form…
Curiosity killed the cat, after all. It was better to be safe than sorry.
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